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Social Media Release: Give Whoever Whatever They Want

Edelman, a leading global PR firm, unveiled its entry into the social media release format evolution with StoryCrafter, a web-based tool for creating and publishing social media press releases for their clients, this week.

SHIFT communications paved the way with their social media format structure released in May 2006. To build and distribute a social media release, check out the as-of-now free service at PRX Builder, a straight-forward approach that lets you fill in the blanks and release.

But, you have to know how to fill in the blanks before you begin.

And, that’s the catch with the social media release. Before we beging working in this template, we research keywords and then stack the release to get high ranking press releases.

All this social media release stuff is way cool . . . but, uhhhhhhhhh, is this what journalists want?

Maybe it’s just us, but our media contacts don’t get it – yet. When we get too woo-hoo techno-fancy we get emails back asking, “Do you have a press release on this?” [Tip: Always good to have an old-school style release in your creative archive at times like these.]

Never mind all the links to images, logos and even YouTube videos. They want the traditional stuff: a well-crafted story with research completed and quotes already written.

Almost three years ago, we came up with a hybrid version and tested it out with our local media contacts. All of them got it and surprisingly, they all like it. Probably because of its simplicity: a prelude parade of important details, complete with links and an “of note” section (i.e., here’s why you’ll love this story) – followed by a traditional release.

At first they said, “We’ve never seen a release like this before.” That’s the point. That’s why we love evolutionaries like Edelman and SHIFT who keep the game fresh and interesting.

For bigger stories or major events, we often post a single page, continually updated, social media release site as a companion piece to our traditional campaign. Who loves this approach? Our clients and their communities – not the media. Yet, anyway.

Writing and publishing both ways offers a range of options for our clients – having their very own social media website positions them as being edgy, aware and current. Who cares that the journalists still ask for emails with attachments?

might be techo-savvy but needs to be trained on how to interpret the social media format

appreciates stories written in a traditional news format

prefers to receive plain text email or faxes

. . . then there’s no point in going all out to fit your news into a format that doesn’t fit their preferred style. They’ll tune out before they ever tune in.

One last point, we recently joint promoted a story with an anonymous leading PR firm. When we showed our rep a video press release prototype, the response we got was, “Really exciting stuff, but we’ll wait until it’s more mainstream.” While social media may not catch on right away with journalists [or PR agencies], the edgy techies like bloggers will love it.

How’s the social media release format working for you? Share your experience with a comment below . . .

kikoozsaid

Newspapers *should* forget news? They certainly massively reduced anything that you would call ‘reporting’ for quite a long time now.
And there are plenty of people writing the kind of opinion peices that they pay for – often better ones – and getting published without any help from newspapers.
What if we just ignored newspapers altogether until they have the decency to start reporting instead of commenting again? I suspect that this accounts for a lot of the apparent hunger out there that is being met my citizen journos. I think that when newspapers try and co-opt this kind of thing, it devalues it anyway. Look at the bear-pit that ‘Comment is Free’ has become.